Belgian state acquitted in trial of kidnapped mixed-race children in Congo

By Agnes Szucs

BRUSSELS (AA) – A Brussels court acquitted the Belgian state Wednesday in a case initiated by five mixed-race women who sued it for being taken away from their Congolese families under colonial rule.

Lea Tavares Mujinga, Monique Bintu Bingi, Noelle Verbeken, Simone Ngalula and Marie-Jose Loshi, who were born between 1946 and 1950 from a Black mother and a Belgian father in Congo, were forcefully separated from their African families and taken to a Catholic orphanage between the ages of 2 and 4.

Legal documents prove that the fathers did not want to take over custody from the Congolese mothers.

But the Belgian colonial administration ordered that the children be placed in a Church-run asylum as part of a systemic strategy stigmatizing interracial relations and preventing so-called “metis” children from claiming a link with Belgium later in their lives.

Along with 20 mixed-race children and Congolese orphans, the girls were raised in dire conditions by Catholic missionary nuns. The children were abandoned by the Belgian authorities after Congo achieved independence in 1960.

The five women sued the Belgian state for crimes against humanity and each of them asked for €50,000 ($56,700) in compensation.

The court ruled against their claim and stated that the Belgian state did not commit a crime against humanity by separating mixed-race children from their mothers.

“The contextual elements do not make it possible to establish that between 1948 and 1961, the policy of placing metis children in religious institutions for racial reasons” should be considered “as a crime against humanity and incriminated as such,” the court decision said.

The ruling also noted that “despite being unacceptable and illegal, these acts are not part of a generalized or systematic, deliberately destructive policy which characterizes, in particular, a crime against humanity.”

In 2019, the country’s then-Prime Minister Charles Michel offered an apology on behalf of the federal government for the discrimination against metis people.

He admitted that mixed-race people “were victims under the colonial administration of the Belgian Congo and Rwanda-Urundi until 1962 and following decolonization, as well as the policy of forced kidnappings associated with it.”